Simon Nicolas Henri Linguet

Social and Education History
E-ISSN: 2014-3567
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Platon, Mircea
Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguets Eighteenth-Century Perspectives on the Intimate
Relationship between a Free Market Economy, the Rise of the Big Government, and the
Creation of a Police State
Social and Education History, vol. 4, nm. 1, febrero, 2015, pp. 49-84
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Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguets Eighteenth-Century Perspectives

on the Intimate Relationship between a Free Market Economy,
the Rise of the Big Government, and the Creation of a Police
State
Mircea Platon1
1) University of Toronto, Canada
rd
Date of publication: February 23 , 2015
Edition period: Edition period: February 2015-June2015
To cite this article: Platon, M. (2015). Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguets

Eighteenth-Century Perspectives on the Intimate Relationship between a
Free Market Economy, the Rise of the Big Government, and the Creation
of a Police State. Social and Education History, 4(1), 49-84.
doi:10.4471/hse.2015.03
To link this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.4471/hse.2015.03
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to Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY).
HSE Social and Education History Vol. 4 No. 1 Febraury 2015 pp.
49-84
Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguets
Eighteenth-Century
Perspectives on the Intimate
Relationship between a Free
Market Economy, the Rise of
the Big Government, and the
Creation of a Police State
Mircea Platon
University of Toronto
Abstract
As a lawyer, economist and journalist of European stature, Linguet argued that the
political and economic ideas advocated by the economic philosophes or the
physiocrats, were bound to lead to a dangerous revolution undertaken without a
clear idea of the true principles of a new and better society. Linguet's opposition to
the physiocrats and his support for the guilds stemmed from a radical populism that
prompted him to accuse the philosophes and the physiocrats of talking about
humanity while neglecting the sufferings of real human beings. Linguet warned
during the 1770s and 1780s that the systematic laissez-faire theories of the
philosophes and Turgot's suppression of the guilds would dissolve the traditional
ties of society and lead to a conflict between a mass of unemployed people and an
oppressive police state. Linguet argued that only a politics of subsistence, welfare,
and preventative nurture would prevent the coming revolution. Linguet's clashes
with the physiocrats would prompt him to develop a theory of underconsumption as
well as a historicist understanding of political economy and of the legal system that
would have a deep influence upon the history of humanist economy.
Keywords: economic liberalism, enlightenment, physiocrats, authoritarianism
2015 Hipatia Press

ISSN: 2014-3567
DOI: 10.4471/hse.2015.03
HSE Social and Education History Vol. 4 No. 1 Febraury 2015 pp.
49-84
Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguet,
Perspectivas en el XVIII sobre
la ntima Relacin entre
Economa de Libre Mercado, el
aumento del "Gran
Gobierno", y la Creacin de un
Estado Policial
Mircea Platon
University of Toronto
Abstract
Como abogado, economista y periodista de talla europea, Linguet argument que las
ideas polticas y econmicas defendidas por los "filosofos economistas", o los
fisicratas, conducan a una revolucin peligrosa emprendida sin una idea clara de
los verdaderos principios de una nueva y mejor sociedad. La oposicin de Linguet a
los fisicratas y su apoyo a los gremios, derivaron a un populismo radical que lo
llev a acusar a los filsofos y los fisicratas de hablar de la humanidad,
descuidando los sufrimientos reales de los seres humanos. Linguet advirti, durante
la dcada de 1770-1780 que las teoras sistemticas del laissez-faire de los
philosophes y la supresin por Turgot de los gremios disolveran los tradicionales
lazos de la sociedad y dara lugar a un conflicto entre una masa de desempleados y
un estado policial opresivo. Linguet argument que slo una poltica de la
subsistencia, bienestar y crianza preventiva impediran la prxima revolucin. Los
enfrentamientos de Linguet con los fisicratas le incitarn a desarrollar una teora de
subconsumo, as como una comprensin historicista de la economa poltica y del
sistema legal que tendra una profunda influencia en la historia de la economa
humanista.
Keywords: liberalism econmico, ilustracin, fiscratas, autoritasrismo
2015 Hipatia Press

ISSN: 2014-3567
DOI: 10.4471/hse.2015.03
HSE Social and Education History, 4(1) 51
O
ne of the ideas embraced, especially after the end of the Cold War,
by both historians of political economy and political pundits is that,
if only left to itself, the free market would be able to provide us
with both a small government and a cornucopia of high quality goods. In
this narrative, regulation breeds big government, and vice versa, and
results in the manufacturing of low quality goods. The smaller the
government, the greater the freedom of the market, and therefore the higher
the quantity and quality of the goods on the shelves of the supermarkets. The
supporters of free market economy have never been able to offer a
convincing explanation of the fact that their very enthusiastic cheers for
global capitalism have always been accompanied by sobs for the growth of
the welfare/nanny state, or big government. Neither could neoliberals
offer convincing explanations of the fact that eugenic ideas, aiming to
lighten the burden of the state by diminishing the number of those deemed
socially, racially, intellectually or physically inferior or unfit, internal
migration control, and racial segregation have always pleasingly haunted the
liberal imagination, from La Beaumelle (Platon, 2011) in the eighteenth
century, to certain neoconservatives who translated the plain, old-fashioned
racism into fiscal conservatism during the Cold War (Glaser & Possony,
1979).
Beginning with the last decades of the eighteenth-century, the supporters of
the free market economy have treated political economy as ontologically
sealed against any historical contamination, as an ecosystem functioning
according to its own laws. Today, neoliberals discuss the growth of the state
with the moral outrage reserved to an ecological catastrophe, as the result of
a greasy political spill into the pure ocean of economics. The resulting story
is one of heroic neoliberal divers struggling and failing, for conjunctural
reasons (the Cold War, the liberal media/academia, Greenpeace), to stop
this spilling caused for contingent, self-serving reasons, by liberal (that is,
leftist in American parlance) politicians who trade freedom for votes.
Neoliberals do not seem to take into account any possible structural
connection between the rise of the free market and the rise of big
government, and therefore interpret the growth of the welfare state simply
as an indication of the economic and political malaise fostered by a political
52 Mirce Platon Liberalism and Police States
class kowtowing to the masses. The discourse of free market is also a

rhetorical tool used by big business to bully the state and convince the
public that what is good for the big corporations is good for the people, and
that no amount of regulation, planning or protectionism could do the amount
of public good that corporate self-interest given free rein in an open market
can do.
But beside theories that treat the rise of the welfare state as a result of
liberal wrongdoings, that is as a political catastrophe that could have been
avoided by not leaving the straight path of pure economics, a handful of
historians have also highlighted the largely neglected possibility that
capitalist economy is bound - for a variety of reasons, among which the
collusion between the big corporations and the state - to lead to a bigger,
more complex, and even more repressive, government, not to a smaller one
(Beard, 1931; Higgs, 1987). Indeed, these arguments have found their first
very cogent proponent in Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguet (1736-1794), whose
writings against Turgots attempt to suppress the guilds in 1776 explored
this structural connection between market deregulation, the low quality of
goods, and the oppressive size of the state, and pointed out to a different
understanding of the nature and relationship between economic and political
values than the neoliberal one.
Linguet and the Philosophe Culture
Edward Gibbon, visiting France in 1763, noted that the pro-philosophe

salons were disparaging Linguets (1762) then recent book on Alexander the
Great. Gibbon (1796) suspected that Linguet was probably a writer of more
genius than he was credited for. Edmund Burke (1778) translated and
published Linguets letters to Voltaire on the question of Grotius and natural
law theory, which Linguet thought at best useless and usually harmful and
which he criticized in the name of a juridical realism akin to Burkes own
historicism. Tocqueville, reading through the vast literature generated by the
French Revolution, found that Linguets pamphlet La France plus
quangloise (1788) was written with very remarkable style, great talent, and
some profound and prophetic views (2001, 2:407). These were mostly in
petto endorsements, circulating in private letters (Gibbons) or confined to
private notebooks (Tocquevilles). If distinguished by its quality, the

historiography dedicated to Linguet (Cruppi, 1895; Vyverberg, 1970; Levy,
1980; Minerbi, 1981; Baruch, 1991; Garoux, 2002; Yardeni, 2005) is also
small in comparison with his output, his eighteenth-century impact and his
all-around relevance for the history of humanist alternatives to free market
economics, many of which were centered on the guilds (Clment, 1854;
Sewell Jr., 1980; Coleman, 1995; Potter, 2000; Kaplan, 2001; Clark, 2007;
Epstein, & Prak, 2008; Fitzsimmons, 2010).
Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguet was born on 14 July 1736, as the second
child of Marie and Jean Linguet, a professor dismissed from the University
of Paris in 1731 for Jansenist leanings. A gifted pupil, Linguet went through
schools on scholarships, winning prizes in classical languages and history.
Early in the 1750s, Linguet tried, like Rousseau, to make a career in
diplomacy, but by 1754 he returned to Paris, where he sought an entrance
into the literary world, befriending the poet Claude-Joseph Dorat, and
frequenting the circle of Elie-Catherine Frron, the editor of the LAnne
littraire and Voltaires archenemy. Leaving for Reims in 1760, Linguet
hatched all sorts of economic and diplomatic schemes during the next two
years, trying to break into the manufacturing and wine trade with the help of
his own family as well as with the support of his former patron, the duke de
Deux-Ponts. When these ventures petered out, Linguet again left Reims for
Paris, where he published his Histoire du sicle dAlexandre (1762) as well
as a pamphlet supporting the recently suppressed Jesuits. Linguets support
of the Jesuits sealed the failure of his book on Alexander the Great, badly
received both by the philosophes and the Jansenists, the enemies of the
Jesuits (Guerci, 1981).
In the summer of 1762, Linguet enlisted in the army as an aide de camp
in the engineering division of Charles Juste, duke of Beauvaus army, and
participated in the Spanish-Portuguese War (1761-1763), which was part of
the Seven Years War between France and England. After the signing of the
peace in 1763, Linguet left Madrid and returned to France, settling himself
in Picardy, in the city of Abbville, where he gained the patronage of Jean-
Nicolas Douville, a former mayor and a counselor in Abbvilles presidial
court. While in Abbville, and partially with the financial support of
Douville, Linguet anonymously published some of his most interesting
works, such as Le Fanatisme des philosophes (1764a) and Ncessit dune

rforme dans ladministration de la justice et dans les lois civiles en France
(1764b), a book, banned by the government, that opened Linguets attack on
Montesquieu and on the thse nobiliaire and advanced the idea of an alliance
between the kings and the Third Estate. In October 1764, Linguet had
himself inscribed as a stagiaire on the rolls of the Parlement de Paris. But
instead of obscurity, Linguet gained European notoriety the very next year,
in 1765, when he became the defender of the chevalier Franois-Jean de la
Barre, accused of destroying a wooden crucifix venerated by the pious
citizens of Abbville. Since one of the young men accused of taking part in
the blasphemy perpetrated on the night of 8 to 9 August 1765 was none
other than Pierre-Jean-Francois-Douville de Maillefeu, the son of Linguets
protector, Linguet was summoned by Douville to defend the accused.
Linguets judicial mmoire, published in June 1766, did not manage to save
La Barre, executed on 1 July 1766, but attracted the attention of public
opinion to the political machinations behind the scenes of the trial by
revealing that the initial investigations regarding this case were conducted by
Duval de Soicourt, a local political enemy of Douville (Maza, 1993, pp. 46-
47). As a result, Duval de Soicourt was forced by Guillaume-Franois-Louis
Joly de Fleury, the procurator general of the Parlement de Paris, to step
down, and in September 1766 the charges against the three remaining
defendants were dropped (Levy, 1980, pp. 35-36). In 1767 Linguet
published his most important work, Thorie des loix civiles, which criticized
Montesquieu's Esprit des lois and proposed an alternative to Montesquieu's
sociology of law and to liberal natural law theories. Badly received by both
the philosophes (Grimm, 1829-1831, 7: 509, 8: 197; La Harpe, 1820-1821,
15: 86-106) and the physiocrats (Baudeau, 1767, pp. 203-204; Mirabeau,
1762), the work nevertheless assured Linguet's reputation as not only a man
of letters and a hot-headed lawyer, but an insightful social critic and political
thinker in the vein of Rousseau.
The beginning of the 1770s found Linguet endorsing the chancellor
Maupeou and his reform of the parlements, and finally supporting Terray
and his anti-physiocratic policies. The polemics against the physiocrats made
Linguet the target of Andr Morellet's Thorie du paradoxe (1775), to which
Linguet answered with a cutting Thorie de la libelle, ou L'Art de calomnier
avec fruit, dialogue philosophique pour servir de supplement a la "Thorie

du paradoxe" (1775) (Morellet, 1821, 1: 226-230). As a result of his attacks
on the Parlement, Linguet was disbarred on 1 February 1774, and the
numerous appeals filed until the fall of 1775 failed to restore his livelihood.
In 1774, Linguet launched his journalistic career as editor of Jean-Joseph
Pancouckes Journal de politique et de littrature. Despite transforming it
into a successful venture, Linguet lost his editorship in July 1776, after
criticizing the French Academy and its secretary, dAlembert, for receiving
in its ranks the mediocre La Harpe. Following Linguets article, outraged
academicians complained to the government, and, as a result of ministerial
pressure, Panckoucke fired Linguet immediately and appointed La Harpe
and Suard in his place. By the end of August 1776, Linguet was therefore
out of journalism as well.
Towards the end of 1776, Linguet left France for England, where he
launched his Annales politiques et littraires and published an open Lettre
de M. Linguet M. le Comte de Vergennes, ministre des affaires trangres
en France (London, 1777) that read like a proclamation of independence and
a declaration of war on all the beneficiaries and tools of despotism in
France. Facing this new torrent of vitriolic political journalism, the Keeper
of the Seals, Armand Thomas Hue de Miromesnil, asserted that the only way
to silence Linguet would be to have him thrown into a cell for life (Levy,
1980, p. 213; Burrows, 2004). Indeed, by 1780, Linguet was tricked into
coming to Paris, where he hoped to reconcile himself with the authorities,
but where he was apprehended and thrown in the Bastille. In 1782 Linguet
was freed and he started wandering through Europe, from England to
Austria. Linguets Mmoires sur la Bastille (1783) was a pan-European best-
seller extremely influential in shaping the revolutionary discourse about the
oppressive nature of the Old Regime (Charpentier, 1789; Evans, 1793;
Cottret, 1986, pp. 105-130). Joseph II ennobled and pensioned Linguet, but
afterwards dismissed him for publishing in Annales some Considrations sur
l'ouverture de l'Escaut (1784) supporting the Brabant rebellion against
Austria.
In 1789, Linguet returned to France where he allied himself with Danton
and Camille Desmoulins, supported the Saint-Domingue revolution, and was
praised by French revolutionary newspapers as a forerunner in the fight
against Old Regime despotism. The papers announced that during that
during his social calls in Paris Linguet used a calling card depicting a lion
keeping in his claws a pike with a Phrygian bonnet on top of it (Le
Martirologe national, 1790, pp. 110-111, 219-222, 262). Indeed, even
German revolutionary publications compared him with an untamable lion
(von Clauer, 1791, p. 32). However, by June 1791, Linguet retired to the
countryside, near Ville dAvray, to Marnes, where he dedicated himself to
agriculture, to local politics, and to his Annales. In June 1793 he was
arrested by Order of the Committee of General Security under the accusation
of conspiring with the king against the nation (Le courier de l'galit, 5
October, 1793, p. 22). He was executed on 27 June 1794 as a partisan and
apostle of despotism. French revolutionary publications would start
lambasting him as an opportunist, as a pen for hire, as a hubristic mercenary
interested only in inflating his ego as well as his pockets (Rive, 1793, pp.
194-95; Delacroix, 1794, pp. 315-16).
Despite these post-mortem attacks, Linguet appears in retrospect a
thinker whose ideological fecundity served to buttress a remarkably stable
social, political, cultural and economic framework. Disbarred, twice thrown
in prison under the Old Regime, a defender of chevalier de La Barre, an
enemy of the philosophes and of the physiocrats, and, as it turned out, not
quite a friend of Robespierre either, a defender of the poor and of the much
maligned Asian despotism, Linguet cast, in the century of Lights, a long
and troublesome shadow. Considered a brutal realist, Linguet was
definitely an anti-nominalist, refusing to get caught in any ideological
cobwebs. Linguets involvement in some of the most resounding human
rights trials of the eighteenth century France, such as the trials of La Barre
and of the duke dAiguillon, the publication of his trial briefs, and his
political journalism - a Journal de politique et de littrature (21 issues
printed in Bruxelles [Paris] between 25 October 1774 and 25 July 1776), and
the Annales politiques, civiques, et littraires (19 volumes published in
London, Bruxelles and Paris between 1777 and 1792) - marked him as one
of the most thorough critics of the Old Regime. As one of the first political
journalists, ready to make appeals to the public opinion, Linguet crafted
elements of the future revolutionary discourse, and criticized the feudalism
of the Old Regime while proposing various fiscal, legal, economic, and
social reforms (Censer, 1994, pp. 179-181; Popkin, 1987). His embrace of
empiricism, his defense of revolutionary causes such as that of the Belgians
revolting against Austrian rule in 1789 or of the Haitians rising against their
French colonial masters in 1791, his preoccupation with political economy
and the situation of the poor and the oppressed, situated him firmly in the
Enlightenment camp. But if he was no defender of the status quo, Linguet
was no member of a party of Enlightenment either. Linguet questioned the
juridical philosophy of the Enlightenment, the political institutions built
upon that legal philosophy, the political economy corresponding to these
legal precepts and political institutions, and finally the proponents of the new
theologico-political consensus. As such, he argued against natural law
philosophy, against a political regime based upon the multiplication,
separation, and balance of powers such as that advocated by Montesquieu
and by his followers, against the economic liberalism of the physiocrats, and
finally against the philosophes.
The physiocrats and the philosophes, such as Diderot, were not always on
the same page, some philosophes having little taste for the benevolent
despotism advocated by the physiocrats, others being more supportive of
industry than the physiocrats, others being too bourgeois to dream of a rural
kingdom, too civic republican to engage in apologies of luxury, or too
opposed to the esprit de systme to enjoy the physiocrats Malebranchian-
Confucian esoteric system, which Galiani ridiculed as economystification
(Weulersse, 1910a, 2: 626-682; 1950, pp. 138-247; 1959, pp. 206-230; Fox
Genovese, 1976, pp. 59-62; Eltis, 1995; Riskin, 2003, pp. 42-73). Despite
these fault lines, and despite protestations to the contrary on the part of the
physiocrats, Linguet labeled the physiocrats as the philosophes
conomistes, tying them firmly to the philosophes. According to Linguet,
both groups had the characteristics of a sect (a term later used by Adam
Smith also), or a cabal. Linguet felt that the philosophes received his
deeply probing writings with a mild, involuntary sneeze and a temporary
agitation that would become, in time, a long-lasting delirium (un dlire
durable) (Linguet, 1771, 1:2). This was, Linguet argued, the fanatical
reaction of a sect trying to control and shape the public discourse in order to
impose its own orthodoxy instead of merely taking part in a public debate.
Linguet pointed out that he was not dispassionately contradicted, but literally
hunted down, insulted, viciously slandered, almost destroyed by his enemies,

among whom the physiocrate journalist Samuel Dupont de Nemours, in the
Ephmerides du citoyen, and the philosophe La Harpe, in the Mercure de
France, were the most virulent (Linguet, 1771, 1: 3,7). This obduracy and
dogmatic inflexibility was, for Linguet, the sign of a sect at work on a
takeover of France. This takeover required the creation of chaos, and
therefore it asked for the destruction of any and all moral or professional
criteria.
Both the physiocrats and the philosophes advertised a freedom that,
Linguet warned, would end up impoverishing, enslaving, and sacrificing the
people for the benefit of the rich. This second characteristic was related to
the first one, since the sectarian singleheadedness and discipline of the sect
made them, both the philosophes and the philosophes conomistes, the
guardians of the new, oligarchic establishment arising from laissez-faire
politics. Linguet argued that the established public intellectuals of the day,
far from being free intellectual agents, were mere tools of those aiming to
increase their economic power in order to achieve a form of economic
despotism they would then convert into political power and use to alter the
whole political machine (Linguet, 1771, 1:9).
The philosophic invasion of the public sphere left people isolated and
epistemologically dizzy, incapable of working out any new way of
reconnecting with reality beyond the ever flowing deluge of signs. The
linguistic explosion caused epistemological poverty and social implosion;
relativism bred both despotism and rebellions since, in the absence of an
order based on consensual values, the only way of staying alive was to
enslave other people. Appealing to the fear of a revival of the sixteenth
century wars of religion, a fear discursively shared by both Jansenists,
Jesuits and the philosophes (Van Kley, 1996, pp. 160-162), Linguet argued
that instead of reforming the French monarchy the philosophes were
unwittingly reopening old wounds and had pushed France on the verge of a
civil war: Throwing around words such as humanity, and reason, we
came near the point of seeing a revival of the quarrels, the schisms, and
maybe even the wars of the sixteenth century (Linguet, 1771, 1:11-12).
Rousseau himself obliquely had warned in the Preface to his First
Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, that the philosophes were an
embodiment of conformism, and that as such they would have been in the
first ranks of the League: There will always be people enslaved by the
opinions of their times, their country, and their society. A man who today
plays the freethinker and the philosopher would, for the same reason, have
been only a fanatic during the time of the League (Rousseau, 2002, p. 46).
Linguet saluted the 1758 suppression of the Encyclopdie, but warned that
this act, far from stopping the advance of the philosophic spirit, merely
prompted it to assume another identity, that of physiocracy.
Robert Shackleton (1977) argued that the suppression of the
Encyclopdie in 1758 marked the birth of a real party of the philosophes
(Garrioch, 2004). While historians have looked for various other similar
watersheds in the decades going from the 1730s to the 1750s, one of them
being the 1752 affaire de Prades (Burson, 2010), the importance that
Linguet attached to physiocracy as a second, practical, incarnation of an
already existing philosophic sect deserves consideration because it
indicates that the crucial developments of the Enlightenment were not
already over by the middle of the eighteenth century, as Jonathan Israel
(2002, pp. 6-7) advanced from a perspective concerned with democratic
equalitarianism, but neglecting economic ideas and changes. With the
emergence of the physiocrats, a version of philosophie went from a
theoretical to a practical phase, from being a more or less oppositional
intellectual discourse to being accepted as part of a program of government.
According to Linguet, the suppression of the Encyclopdie merely ushered
in a new incarnation of the philosophical sect. Abandoning its
encyclopedic envelope, the sect became the buzzing insect that, since
then, all of us have called economics or economic science (Linguet, 1771,
1:13). The metaphysical speculations that preoccupied the first incarnation
of the esprit philosophique were abandoned for something more dangerous
for the people. As philosophes, the sect could be contained and its effects
circumscribed to elite salons, whereas the conomistes had arrived in a
position to change France by direct political and economic intervention.
Linguet was convinced that the philosophes harmed people by multiplying
the number of empty intellectual signs, thus making social commerce
impossible. On the other hand, the conomistes altered the very conditions of
life by fostering economic monopolies, oligarchies, and by an excessive
monetarization of economy that forced people to bow to the market. The

poor could therefore ignore the philosophes, but it was impossible for them
to remain untouched by the conomistes.
Tocqueville (2001, 1:195-205) would later argue that the philosophes,
because isolated from real politics, nurtured radical, utopian ideas that
fomented the revolutionary upheavals of 1789-1794. Linguet, on the other
hand, claimed that the philosophes were not revolutionary, but corrupting,
that is they did not challenge the establishment, but tried to please it in ways
that, according to Linguet, harmed France in the long run. The philosophes
were not dangerous in opposition, but in power, since their influence was not
merely theoretical, but practical, as mercenaries supporting any status-quo,
even an utterly corrupt one (Linguet, 1764a, p. 13). Not unlike Rousseau in
the First Discourse, what Linguet condemned was not the philosophes
radicalism, but a sort of eighteenth-century trahison des clercs: the
philosophes were not too little, but too much involved in real politics, that is
in the administration of power and in the accumulation of huge wealth.
Instead of pitting reason against injustice, the philosophes rationalized
injustice, and expertly crafted learned arguments supporting the interests and
policies of their financial backers (Linguet, 1764a, p. 18). Reason justified
goals and thus ways of life alien to it.
Linguet, the Guilds, and the Politics of Simplicity
If Linguet argued throughout his whole life against philosophie, in both its
cultural and economic forms, and if the main thrust of his argument
concerned both the philosophes and the physiocrats, Linguets concern for
the culture of politics stayed with him longer than his preoccupation with the
politics of culture. Whereas Linguets first writings were dominated by
literary concerns, in the 1770s and 1780s Linguet attacked mainly the
politico-economic embodiment of philosophie that was Physiocracy.
For the Physiocrats, the ultimate reality was that of nature and of
natural law. The role of the state was iconic: it participated in that reality and
mediated mans participation in that reality too. Hence, the state had not
merely an existence of fact, but one of right: it was, so to say, deified
according to this physiocratic Platonic deism. People were a component of
the state, and their happiness was an element of the perfect, natural,
physiocratic state. The physiocrats recognized, as Warren J. Samuels noted,
no rights independent of state law, and even property was less sacred
than expedient and useful in maintaining the ideal physiocratic State
(Samuels, 1992, pp. 12-27, 28-46). The physiocratic drives to streamline the
state for future progress were not accompanied by any sustained or
systematic efforts to propose any way of coping with individual misfortune
and poverty and did not take into account the historicity of human existence
(Root, 1987, p. 111). Although, as Intendant of Limoges, Turgot created the
ateliers de charit, a sort of public works system offering a temporary job in
building roads which played an important role in helping the free trade in
the physiocratic scheme of things - to women, children and unskilled men
unable to win their daily bread otherwise, this program could not be
extended to the rest of France for lack of adequate financial resources. The
destitute population of France stood at around a fifth of the total population
and the physiocratic reforms aiming to increase agricultural productivity by
partitioning and enclosing common lands and woods left many families
without a livelihood, severed from their traditional ties and safety networks
(Hufton, 1974, pp. 1, 183-88; McStay Adams, 1990, pp, 240-43).
For Linguet, on the contrary, the starting point was the welfare of the
people since, for Linguet, the natural law was not an expression of the
universal order, but of social realities, of human needs and passions. For
Linguet, the states legitimacy did not rest on its putative natural or
supernatural (Christian) foundations, but on its social utility. The most
important prerogative of the ruler was that of preserving the dignity of
man and of not allowing the debasement of the People, a concept which,
according to Linguet, designated the real Sovereign (Linguet, 1770, 50).
Linguet argued that since it was impossible to go back to the primordial and
truly rightful situation preceding the appearance, by theft, of private
property, the state existed as a means to a social end: to ensure public peace
and to protect the right to life of its citizens. The state did not have any
mission to harmonize citizens with a rational, transcendent, natural order.
Linguet feared that English-style economic and political liberalism would
result in the rise of an aristocratic monarchy, of an oligarchic system in
which people would have no recourse to justice, and the rich and powerful
would go unpunished (Linguet, 1770, p. 74). Writing in his Thorie des loix
civiles, Linguet argued that economic liberalism would multiply the
bureaucratic-administrative networks and the abuses it was supposed to stifle
and would stifle instead precisely the freedom it was supposed to nurture
(Linguet, 1770, pp. 72-73). Putting in practice the idea of the balance of
powers required the growth of the administrative apparatus. This
multiplication of the branches of the state would lead to the real despotism
of that horrible administration which is death, the putrefaction of a state.
Yet, Linguets attack on bureaucracy did not signal him as an enemy of what
we call today big government. According to Linguet, more than the
concentration of power in the hands of a single person, citizens should fear
the inflationary dispersal of such power, which would result in the total
neglect of the laws and to executive and judicial incapacity. Linguet did not
deplore the regulating state, but the dissolution of the state authority, the
incapacity of the state to uphold its laws and to enforce its standards due to
its bureaucratic proliferation, to political factionalism and to economic
oligarchies. In fact, for Linguet, despotism was not the same as a strong
government, but similar to a ghostly government, to an absence of
government, or a minimal state: Despotism is so little like a government,
that right from the moment when despotism begins any form of government
ceases to exist (Linguet, 1770, pp. 45-46). Linguet argued that the balance
of powers theory would prevent those in power from doing any good, but
would enable them to harm the citizens. Checks and balances liberalism,
argued Linguet, made the people a prisoner of the institutions. The
multiplication of institutions benefited only the rich, since the poor would
never have enough money or time to pursue justice through the required
institutional channels (Linguet, 1764b, p. 9). Linguet acknowledged the
existence of only two socio-political categories: the rulers, and the subjects,
that is those who ruled and those who had to obey because they had the
weaker hand. Multiplying the branches of the government did nothing to
weaken the elites monopoly on power. On the contrary, argued Linguet, the
power elites would gain control of the newly-created state institutions and
use them to increase their pressure on people by bribing certain social
segments and by marginalizing others (Linguet, 1774, pp.1-44-86).
Beside the political conditions for the growth of a despotic big

government, the English liberal model would create the economic
conditions favorable to this growth. Despotism, Linguet argued, thrived in
societies reduced to a multitude of isolated individuals, easier to exploit
(Linguet, 1770, p. 101; see also De Dijn, 2008; Rahe, 2009). And since
economic liberalism tended to atomize societies, Linguet argued that the
proper political answer to such a social crisis was not the multiplication of
state bureaucracies to the expense of the former, organic, forms of solidarity
and policing. The price of political freedom was, Linguet argued, social and
economic solidarity. Economic liberalism destroyed the complex web of
social and economic solidarities existing at a popular level while promising
to secure the citizens freedom by a web of political solidarities, of political
representative institutions and mediating instances between the rulers and
the ruled. Yet, Linguet insisted, social and economic organic solidarities and
particularities cannot be replaced by individualism at the grass-roots level
and labyrinthine bureaucratic solidarities at the state level.
Linguet argued that granting political rights would not alleviate economic
inequalities, and that all political rights derived from the right to own private
property and thus to not depend on anyone for ones own subsistence.
Therefore, protecting private property and guaranteeing the right to
subsistence became the pillars of Linguets political system, whose
cornerstone was not the state, but the person. Or, Linguet rejected
physiocratic laissez-faire ideology precisely because it disenfranchised
people by leaving them to the mercy of the market forces, of rich oligarchs
and of speculators. The physiocrats were the first to proceed to the
neutralization of history in political economic discourse. This
neutralization or evacuation of history from the political economic discourse
had two aspects: the first one was to announce the ontological
enclosurability of the economic factor and to attribute to this space natural
dimensions, thus severing it from history. In the words of Franois Quesnay
himself: Les sciences mmes abandonnent le systme du territoire et vont
se perdre dans le systme de lunivers (Weulersse, 1910b, p. 28). The
economic factor was thus treated as a natural reality decipherable in terms
of eternal, natural laws, adverse to experimentation and asking for the use of
the deductive method (Arnaud, Barrillon, & Benredouane, 1991, p. 412).
Consequently, the variations, the alternatives, the afterthoughts and the

specific situations that had required specific answers from the economic
masters would be overlooked or discarded as errors in order to preserve the
uninterrupted ideological homogeneity of political economic orthodoxy.
Thus, liberal political economy refused historicization and contingency. But
the elimination of history from economic thinking would also mean, as the
economic historian Mark A. Lutz (1999) showed, disregarding the amount
of time (years, decades) it would take the market to regain its balance after
a shock. It was an interval of hunger, cold, joblessness, death and quiet or
rebellious desperation that physiocratic political economy, content with the
big picture, did not address.
Linguets objections regarded precisely this set of problems. In the first
place he showed that economic policy had nothing to do with fanatical and
sectarian proclamations of a universal dogma, but with political, social and
geographical contingencies. The foreign policy, demographics, natural
resources, and political system of a country ought to have counted as factors
shaping its domestic economic policy. Linguet also noted that, blinded by a
peculiar combination of unenlightened self-interest and naivet, the
physiocrats ignored the sufferings of the poor, and that while they embraced
the rhetoric of humanitarianism, their policies resulted in misery, alienation
and death. When the urban proletariat revolted because their salaries did not
keep up with the inflation, the government resorted to violence and threw
them in prison instead of helping them avoid starvation by giving them
what was rightly theirs (Linguet, 1770, p. 180). Two of the most original
articulations of Linguets criticism of the physiocrats were his analysis of the
physiocrats theory of costs and profits, and his critique of the theory of the
economic cycle from the point of view of what might be called a theory of
underconsumption, according to which Linguet pointed out that sacrificing
small farmers for the sake of creating big agribusinesses would lead to a
decrease in the number of consumers. Underconsumption would come to the
fore of economic literature only in the nineteenth century, due to Jean
Simonde de Sismondi in the French speaking world and to Thomas R.
Malthus or John A. Hobson in the English speaking world (Nemmers, 1972;
Spengler, 1980, pp. 333-343).
The physiocrats affirmed that there was a certain natural order based on
eternal and unchanging laws, as imprescriptible as those of physics (Laski,
1936, pp. 207-8). In order to prosper, any society had to follow these rules
(Du Pont de Nemours, 1910, p. 7). The reforms proposed by the physiocrats
were not a result of temporary economic necessity, but a rigid deduction
from certain unassailable and immutable principles, newly discovered by
their master Quesnay (Einaudi, 1938, p. 10). Quesnays system was
expounded, developed and popularized by his followers, Pierre Samurel Du
Pont de Nemours, the marquis de Mirabeau, Nicolas Baudeau (1776), and
Pierre-Paul Le Mercier de la Rivire (1767; see also May, 1975, pp. 58-94),
who advanced the idea that agriculture was the only productive endeavor.
Only agriculture brought a net profit, that is a rent over and above the
costs of production and the entrepreneurs profits (Einaudi, 1938, p. 11). In
agriculture, the physiocrats thought they discovered a source of wealth that
has the privilege of multiplying infinitely (Weulersse, 1959, p. 14) thus
breaking with the zero sum economic theory of classical civic
republicanism. This also meant that if the first generation of physiocrats (the
early Quesnay, abb Gabriel-Franois Coyer) were interested in small-scale
agriculture, the second generation of physiocrats (lead by a reconstructed
Quesnay, Mirabeau, Baudeau, Dupont de Nemours, Le Mercier de La
Rivire) would insist upon large farms, which they saw as more profitable
since by cutting costs the big farmers would create more of that net
product, or capital needed to sustain the whole economic body. This, as
Linguet shrewdly pointed out, indicated that the physiocrats were interested
only in the produit net, not in the well-being of the people.
Ontologically impermeable to history, and therefore to the sufferings of a
humanity reduced to the status of a cog in the wheel of a naturalized, greater
scheme of economic things, physiocracy, in Linguets opinion, betrayed its
promise, even while fulfilling its premises. According to Linguet, despite its
promise of freedom and prosperity, physiocracy would bring only
servitude, poverty, and death, because physiocracy sought to increase the
net profit by cutting costs in order to increase productivity. Since one of
the costs targeted for elimination was that of human labor, physiocracy
reduced human beings to the status of mere cheap and therefore expendable
tools. According to the physiocrats, the net profit could be increased by
reducing the number of small independent farmers - whom the physiocrats

wanted to transform into rural proletarians - and by further reducing the
number of rural proletarians by forcing them to choose between starvation
and inner migration to the cities as urban proletarians. Linguet denounced
the economic calculations of the physiocrats as demographically ruinous,
economically crude, and humanely cruel, and warned that they would
amount to a sum of privations rather than to an equality of pleasure
(Linguet, 1771, 2: 210-11). The physiocrats promised a flourishing
economic life based on the fact that wealth would eventually trickle down in
a naturally, perfectly balanced system. Linguet argued that, in fact, the
increase of wealth postulated by physiocracy was dependent upon
imbalances in the system, that economic liberalism thrived on imbalances
produced by such common eighteenth-century practices (Thirsk, 1999;
Wyngaard, 2004, pp. 151-90) as the enclosures of the commons, renting
ones land to the higher bidder after expelling the peasant families who used
to work that land, or the sudden increases in the price of bread. These
revenue increases, Linguet argued, lasted only until all the other prices rose
to keep up with them, with the more expensive price of bread, for example.
So, if the increase in wealth was dependent not upon the balance but upon
the imbalances of the system, the net result would mean that the physiocratic
system would only be favorable to those able to create such imbalances. But
the economic veneration of wealth gave birth to the political cult of the
wealthy, according to Linguet, who argued that, by focusing on the
accumulation of wealth, the physiocrats opened the way to the cult of the
rich, of oligarchs: Full of a not very philosophic veneration for anyone who
has a big purse, they kneel in front of that fortunate being; and stand up only
in order to order the entire world to submit to the same humiliation, and to
claim that only these individuals deserve our respect (Linguet, 1771,
2:222).
Linguet was not interested in how much energy one physiocratic
farmer could milk out of Nature, but in how many people could subsist on
a certain piece of land, or in how many livelihoods could be preserved by a
political economy favoring the small farmers, craftsmen or merchants.
Linguet pointed out that, compared with the big farms, small farms were
cultivated with greater care, that their soil was less depleted, that they
employed more people and paid in nature, avoiding the monetarization of the
economy and the bankruptcies accompanying the development of a
monetary economy (Linguet, 1771, 2:210-211). Big farms were, instead,
more lucrative for their owner, but infinitely more damaging to that corner
of the country were they are located, and to the state in general because they
destroyed the local economy by replacing the stable peasant-tenants with
migrant workers: thus, both the profit of the owner and the salary of the
temporary workers is not reinvested locally, but in the city or in other
provinces. In the end, the wealth of the big farm owner is spurious because it
is obtained by ruining the countryside by investing less in it and in the
people inhabiting it. It was a wealth that robbed the people of their dignity,
of their means of subsistence and in the end of their freedom. Political
freedom, the political rights of a human being possessing nothing, being
reduced to selling its own personal labor on a market swelling with cheap
available workforce, was nothing. The physiocrats claimed that by
liberalizing the labor market they were making work available to everyone
(Sheperd, 1903; Maldidier, & Robin, 1973; Groenewegen, 2002. pp. 314-
30). But the physiocratic policy of opening up the labor market drove down
the price of labor and made it hard for workers to subsist by their own work.
If the physiocrats offered a man the right to emancipate himself by selling
his own labor on the marketplace, Linguet maintained that politics, even
parliamentarian politics, as in England, was a game of force, and that only an
independent, self-sustaining man could stand for his freedoms, while a hired
hand was worse than a slave. Freedom, like property, existed for Linguet
first as a fact and only afterwards as a right. It was, in a way, a non-
nominalist, human scale, prescriptive liberty. For Linguet, small property
was the only bulwark against the grasping hand of both the state and the big
private monopolies. While Linguet was not a follower of Montesquieus
political theory and disparaged intermediary bodies such as parlements,
which he saw not as bulwarks against despotism but as a way of trickling
down despotism and corruption, his politics of simplicity required the
existence of the economic intermediary bodies known as guilds, or
jurandes.
When, in January 1776, Turgot promulgated his famous six edicts, one of
which dissolved the craft guilds, Linguet jumped to their defense.
Paradoxically, Turgot attacked the guilds precisely because he was not an

orthodox physiocrat, and as such he was not ready to neglect industry for the
sake of agriculture (Fairchilds, 1988, pp. 688-692). The corporations
suppressed by Turgot were professional organizations having the right to
manage their own affairs, to define and enforce their own standards of
quality, to establish the selling price, and to issue professional licenses. The
guilds also functioned as support networks for their sick, poor or otherwise
afflicted members. But Turgots dit portant la suppression des jurandes
(1913-1923, 5: 238-55) charged the guilds with stifling free competition,
with keeping the prices unnecessarily high due to their monopolistic
practices, with encroaching upon the right to work by their quality controls
and by their conditions of access to mastership after long years of
apprenticeship, after producing a masterpiece, and after paying what
Turgot deemed to be high taxes in order to accede to the rank of master. The
guilds, wrote Turgot, blocked competition among craftsmen by refusing the
right to work to immigrant jobless craftsmen coming from England. Despite
de fact that women were actually able to use to their advantage the guild
system (Crowston, 2000; Lanza, 2007, pp. 83-152), Turgot claimed that
guild standards kept women and the poor out of certain crafts, such as
embroidery, for which, Turgot argued, women were particularly suited
(Turgot, 1913-1923, 5: 241). The right to work was sacred, argued Turgot,
it was God-given, and therefore it was not a right that the monarchy should
sell to its subjects: everybody should be free to practice whatever craft they
were willing and able to master (Turgot, 1913-1923, 5: 242-43). Turgot
accused the guilds of squandering huge sums of money on feasts as well as
on lawsuits. Either too convivial or too querulous, the guilds spent money in
ways that Turgot could single out as particularly heinous in the context of
the French governments frantic attempts to deal in the 1770s with Frances
huge fiscal deficits (Kwass, 2000, pp. 21-115). Turgot therefore attacked the
guilds not merely in the name of the laissez faire that physiocrats opposed
to that form of Asian despotism that was regulation (Vroil, 1870, p. 219),
but also from the perspective of the discourse of financial austerity that was
becoming increasingly important for a monarchy submerged in public debt.
Turgot suggested that the state might profit more from a flourishing industry
liberated from guild constraints than from selling offices related to these
corporations. Therefore, with the exception of four guilds, those of the

barbers-wigmakers-steamroom keepers, of apothecaries, of
silver/goldsmiths, and of printers/booksellers, all the other guilds saw their
rules and their corporate freedoms abolished. The battle against Turgots
edicts raged between January and July 1776. In January Turgot issued the
edict of the suppression of the corporations, in March it was registered by
the Parlement after a royal lit de justice, but by July it was abandoned in
favor of a mixed system that allowed the corporations to exist, but put them
in competition with free craftsmen.
Linguets Rflexions de six corps de la Ville de Paris, sur la suppression
des Jurandes opened with a brief historical disquisition on the guilds,
followed by an enumeration of Turgots complaints against them and a point
by point refutation of Turgots claims. In the third and final section, Linguet
presented a case for preserving the guilds. Linguet started by pointing out
that China, a country of reference for the Physiocrats, regulated the trades in
the spirit of a very rigorous despotism, completely opposed to Turgots
attack on the guilds in the name of libert, indpendance, and
concurrence (Linguet, 1776, p. 2). Regulation, Linguet argued, was only
normal, since there had never been a period in the history of any great
Empire or significant City without corporations: either established by
the state, or sui generis creations (Linguet, 1776, p. 2). Indeed, the history of
guilds shows that there were two ways of establishing a corporation: the
Roman way, by state-sponsored organization and incorporation, and the
Germanic way, by the grass-roots, democratic establishment of
confraternities consecrated by no positive law but consisting in groups of
people seeking to become friends and look after their own common interests
and justice (Black, 1984, pp. 3-43). Linguet looked therefore at the guilds
and trade corporations as historically confirmed cogs in the governmental
wheel, as Montesquieu-an pillars of the state. In other words, while Linguet
did not recognized the representativity of the aristocratic Parlements, he saw
the craft guilds as part of the Nation, and as bulwarks to despotism
(Linguet, 1776, p. 3).
Like the nineteenth-century conservative Juan Donoso Cortes (Imatz,
2013, p. 146), with whom he also shared a historicist understanding of the
law, Linguet argued that guilds were therefore useful from an administrative
point of view, since they articulated and policed society. Far from being
inimical to freedom, guilds secured the existence of that order without which
freedom was impossible: they were the regiments without which society
would crumble in disarray and people would desert their duties (Linguet,
1776, p.3). Considering that their existence was not a hindrance, but a
resource of the state, Linguet recommended the reform of the guilds, not
their abolition. Linguet hinted that instead of squeezing them financially, for
taxes and corporate loans to the monarchy, the state should consider the
much more important political ways in which the guilds could serve the
monarchy. Linguet would revisit this idea in 1788-1789, in the context of the
pre-revolutionary crisis, when, to the dismay of the international banking
creditors of France (Clavire, 1788), he urged the monarchy to declare
bankruptcy and thus to refuse the politics of austerity imposed by the
bankers, and called for an anti-aristocratic alliance between the monarch and
the Third Estate (Van Kley, 1996, pp. 282-88, 317-21).
The suppression of the guilds was, for Linguet, merely another step in the
direction of physiocratic despotism, the despotism of the rich robbing the
people of their livelihoods under the guise of liberalizing the right to work.
Indeed, Turgot and the physiocrats saw the dissolution of the guilds as an
essential step toward creating an urban space for the rural proletarians
displaced from villages by the enclosure of the commons and the creation of
big farms, which most of the physiocrats considered more profitable than the
subsistence agriculture. If, refused a livelihood in the villages, as agricultural
workers, the poor would also have been unable to enter a trade in the cities,
the government might have had on its hands a huge mass of discontented
people, in the already difficult context of revolts caused by the rising price of
bread due to bad crops and the partial deregulation of grain trade (the
intendants subtly manipulated the grain market, supplying it with provisions
bought with state money in order to lower the prices). Turgots attack on the
guilds had therefore political motivations as well as ideological overtones.
Linguet noted four ministerial reasons supporting the abolition of the
guilds: first, the expansion of industry; second, the diminution of the price of
work and of manufactured goods; third, the reduction of what we call now
red tape, of bureaucratic regulation of business; and fourth, the
suppression of wasteful and vindictive trials between guilds such as the
judicial feud between bakers and steakhouse proprietors about whether or

not the later were allowed to own an oven. Linguet answered that, in fact,
the guilds acted as preservers of quality standards. He noted that Swiss
clockmakers, where manufacture was unregulated, could no compete with
French craftsmen (Linguet, 1776, pp. 4-5; see also Turner, 2008). Indeed,
the question of quality stood at the heart of this debate. The physiocrats
protested that requiring ten years of apprenticeship in order to be declared a
master tub maker betrayed a dim view of human intelligence and insisted
that workers and craftsmen had to be willing to retrain to compete in the free
and rapidly changing job market. Linguet answered that it was impossible to
master a craft without years of hard and constant work, and that only guilds
allowed craftsmen to train in such a way. But the physiocrats readiness to
dispense with training was a practical consequence of their nominalist
axiology according to which absolute quality did not exist. Simon Clicquot
de Blervache (1723-1796), an academic prize-winning physiocrat who was,
together with Linguets enemy Morellet, a member of the physiocratic circle
working in the 1750s under the protection of Vincent de Gournay, the royal
Intendant of Commerce (Minard, 1998; Skornicki, 2006), argued that the
only duty of the manufacturers and of the merchants was not to offer good
merchandise, but merchandise that would sell well and that could spur
demand by fueling the consumers caprice, fantasy, and whims
(Blervache, 1758, p. 44). Indeed, Blervache argued that manufacturers could
be more useful to the state by producing mediocre and even bad goods, as
long as the low price of this shoddy merchandise invites and determines
the people to consume (Blervache, 1758, p. 49). As Inspecteur general des
manufactures et du commerce, a position he occupied between 1765 and
1790, Blervache developed this line of argument in 1779 in a series of
memoirs successfully requesting the continuation of the mixed or two tiered
system in which regulated and unregulated manufacturers coexisted (Vroil,
1870, 161).
If Turgot claimed that abolishing the guilds would lower prices, Linguet
pointed out that competition only served to lower the quality of products,
since the war of prices would by necessity force craftsmen to cheat on
quality in order to maintain as low a price as possible. Honest craftsmen,
Linguet argued, would be forced either to stop being honest or get out of
business because they would not be able to face dishonest competitors. By

the end of 1776, Linguet, who had quarreled with Panckoucke, left France
for England. Therefore Linguets letter on the jurandes must be dated around
March-June 1776. In March 1776, Adam Smith published what was to
become his classic work, The Wealth of Nations, in which, from a position
inimical to the guilds, he famously and alliteratively hold that the butcher,
the backer, and the brewer did not sell their clients a product of quality
because of their social concerns, but only because it was in their own
interests to do so. We do not know if Linguet read Smith in 1776 or later,
but in defending the guilds he pointed out one of the inconsistencies in the
liberal line of thought. Thus, Linguet argued that, in order for it to be in the
self-interest of producers to turn out, or of merchants to sell, a good product,
they would have to live in what Peter Laslett would later call a face to face
society (Laslett, 1963). In a world wide open to the free circulation of
goods, in big cities swarming with people moving in and out as undetected
as the origins of the goods they buy or sell, the buyer could not exert the
quality control that was available to someone living in a smaller, more
cohesive community. Someone from the faraway corners of an empire could
not penalize the faulty craftsmanship of the metropolitan producer. Distance
bred irresponsibility, and free circulation encouraged transporting the goods
to increasingly faraway markets. Therefore, free circulation decoupled self-
interest from responsibility (Linguet, 1776, pp. 6-7).
Linguet pointed out the social and economic benefits of cooperation, and
his accent on the importance of social capital prompted modern scholars to
consider him as one of the first great socialist thinkers or to bestow upon
him the title of the first anti-economist (Durkheim, 1961, p. 94 ; Coleman,
2002, pp. 22-28). According to Linguet, cooperation allowed manufacturers
to be extremely flexible in meeting the fluctuating demands of the market
without raising the prices or hiring and firing people according to the
impersonal demands of the marketplace. And this flexibility was possible
only because the cost was partly absorbed by social capital, by guild
solidarity yet unspoiled by a free-market economy dedicated to fierce
competition for markets and lower costs. Guilds functioned as an insurance,
welfare, and supply network that helped producers and consumers avoid the
fluctuations of the market The guild system cushioned the effects of the
boom and bust capitalist economic cycle by not allowing craftsmen give in
to what we now call bubbles, and to what Linguet called this imaginary
bigness (cette grandeur chimrique) to which they were suddenly
catapulted by good times (Linguet, 1776, p. 9). Linguet argued that
producers fixated on competition for a corner of the market and for profits
would lose sight of the buyer, who would end up being forced to choose
between shoddy goods produced at the lowest possible cost. Unbridled
competition would be bad for manufacturers, too, since they would stand at
the mercy of the middle-man, of the distributors whose interest was to buy
cheaply and to sell dearly. Faced with competition, the producer would try to
meet the orders of the distributors as fast as he could, thus sacrificing quality
for the sake of productivity: He will cheat the merchant, who, at his turn,
will cheat the buyers (Linguet, 1776, pp. 7-8).
Therefore, liberal economic rationality, far from simplifying the
economic life, would just result in flooding the market with a wave of fake
artisans, shoddy goods, and dishonest merchants. Rushing to replace the old,
honest masters craftsmen, would be parasitical masters, eager to
manufacture or to invest in manufacturing anything that sold well, and thus
ruining the old masters dedicated to the perfection of their craft. (Linguet,
1776, p. 17). This deluge of fake goods would force the state to control it by
creating agencies dedicated to quality controls. Removing therefore the
quality controls at the guild level would force the state to assume tasks
previously accomplished by the guilds. Whenever a certain craftsman would
have to obtain a license in order to practice his craft, this license would have
to be provided either by his guild or by state authorities. The alternative
would be to dispense with professional licenses altogether in order to attain
that simplicit de rgie much praised by Turgot and by the physiocrats.
But if the state deemed that professional licenses would still be necessary,
then shifting them from the guild to state administration would not result in
any simplification of economic life, or reduction of state bureaucracy.
Liberal economics and big government, argued Linguet, are inherently
correlated, since liberal economics required tearing up the whole social
fabric based on guild autonomy. The state would then have to spin the web
of a police state as the price of destroying those very useful resources of the
state that were the guilds, already invested with traditional liberties, and
organically involved in policing the kingdom (Linguet, 1776, p. 10). It was a

perfect example of what Tocqueville would describe later as a growth of the
leveling, administrative state at the expense of civil society, a form of
centralization that violently removed certain prerogatives from civil society,
where they were exercised in a reasonably fair manner, only to award them
to the state administration.
Turgot and the physiocrats argued that the liberalization of industry was
crucial for the creation of a larger market for agricultural products, that is for
big farmers. Linguet warned that liberalizing the manufacturing sector would
on the contrary be ruinous for the countryside. Peasants, argued Linguet,
would be lured to the cities by the hope and promise of easy money, by the
idea of engaging in some productive manufacturing activity, without having
to submit first to long years of apprenticeship. Once the guilds abolished, the
quality of products would crumble, and the relatively homogenous quality
maintained by the guilds would be replaced by a multi-tiered system, with
different levels of quality, for different pockets. Lowering quality levels
would allow immigrant peasants to hope that, even if they would never
achieve great mastery, they would acquire enough skills to secure a
mediocre living. Thus, lowered manufacturing standards would in fact breed
social unrest, since the market would be crowded by mediocre producers of
worthless goods. And those mediocre producers would soon find themselves
in a strange city and out of a job, with their dreams crushed and unable to
return to the countryside. If physiocrats maintained that knowledge was the
first property of a man, and that depriving somebody of a good education
was similar to expropriating him, Linguet retorted that destroying quality
standards, pushing people in the direction of a perpetual improvisation to
meet the demands of the market, and depriving them of the chance to
acquire, refine and securely practice a craft was similarly ruinous for the
individual and for the state (Linguet, 1776, p. 14). Linguet warned therefore
that the idea, dear to the physiocrats and advanced by Adam Smith in his
Wealth of the Nations, that any worker who would not find work in the city
would just go back to the countryside or would just learn another trade was
false. Trying to find a solution to the problems raised by unemployment,
Linguet supported the creation of a social welfare fund, or caisse
nationale, and tackled homelessness in a Plan dtablissement, tendans

lextinction de la mendicit (1779).
Trades were thus distorted by the same consumer culture as the
intellectual life denounced by Linguet in his anti-philosophe writings. Since
acquiring a craft was an exercise in stability and competence, the guilds
produced useful citizens, even though unenlightened by the standards of
the philosophes controlling the salon-centered public sphere. Eliminating
the guilds with their apprenticeship requirements was simply another way to
leave people at the mercy of their own emotions, whims, and unrealistic
ambitions. Linguet feared that, instead of learning a craft, young people
would just float between jobs, and would go from profession to profession
without really mastering anything. If the physiocrats argued that blocking
the entrance of young, poor people in the trades produced a mass of
unemployed vagrants, Linguet argued that suppressing the guilds would
erode the economic and symbolic status of work itself, producing a mass of
overworked vagrants, of people for whom a job would not mean a secure
place in the world. Linguet warned that abolishing the guilds would
encourage the apparition of unsettled individuals who would easily fall prey
to a new mass consumer culture that, influenced by philosophe culture,
would fuel wishful thinking, baseless pride, and inflated pretensions.
Immersed in this culture, the French would become a people ruined by a
revolution of higher expectations excited by the philosophes (Linguet, 1776,
pp. 5-6).
Linguet cogently denounced the effects of the proletarization of the
peasants, analyzed so well by the nineteenth-century sociologists and
economists (Patnaik, 2007, pp. 86-127). He argued that, far from being a
natural, that is a smooth because organic evolution, the urban acculturation
of a peasantry hunted from the countryside by enclosures and a free-market
economy was a violent process in which people, torn form their rustic and
respectable occupations, would be exposed to a violent cultural shock (the
vertiges de la culture des Arts dans les Villes) (Linguet, 1776, p. 14). The
result of this acculturation would be the creation of a mass of alienated
peasants/proletarians (Villageois dpayss), neither peasants nor
bourgeois, tortured by hunger and moral decay, and impossible to police
since the waning of the guilds would bring with it that of social control.
Linguet argued that it was easier to police corporations than individuals.

After destroying the old guild structure of civil supervision and professional
control, the state would have to build an entire police apparatus, such as
Napoleon did later, with far thinner organic connections to the civil society
than the guilds. Abolishing the guilds, who policed the moeurs and
nourished the purity of family life (Linguet, 1776, p. 19), would force the
state to ensure public peace with the help of another guild, that of
professional policemen. The citizens would eventually find policemen far
more alien and intrusive than the old guilds, which had provided social
stability at the neighborhood level. With guilds, society policed itself: with a
police force, it would be the state policing society (Linguet, 1776, p. 15).
Linguet warned that, in case of a rebellion of jobless workers or ruined
craftsmen, the state would be unable to calm social tensions using the proven
ways and channels of the guilds. Losing any contact with the people, the
state would thus lose its capacity to negotiate with its citizens. This
incapacity would in its turn lead to the need for harsher punishments and for
more severe repression in case of popular revolt (Linguet, 1776, p. 18).
Linguet feared that governmental violence against jobless workers would
only serve to delegitimize the monarchy. The result would be a general
revolution resulting in the violent fall of the monarchy: Out of the blood of
these victims would grow the tree of liberty (Linguet, 1776, p. 19). The
genius of the guilds was that they took care of everything, balanced
everything, reconciled everything (Linguet, 1776, p. 19), securing for
craftsmen a certain degree of financial and social stability and also allowing
the bourgeois their fair share of social honors and authority (Shovlin, 2000).
Linguet deemed this last characteristic especially important in a society in
which the manufacturing and commercial bourgeoisie was rejected from
careers, such as the military, allowing a more luminous glory than that of
the workshop (Linguet, 1776, p. 19).
Abolishing the guilds would therefore mean abolishing the principle of
honor that connected the king with his most humble subject (Smith, 2005).
Along with the honor would go any other criteria for judging the quality of
workmanship. The disappearance of professional criteria would lead to the
vanishing of any social rules, and also of social solidarity, of the sense of
moral obligation that made members of the guilds take care of craftsmens
widows or of craftsmen going through dry patches (Linguet, 1776, p.20).

The fallout from a free-market economic policy and the abolition of the
guilds as intermediary links in the great social chain all these, Linguet
concluded, would force the state to specialize in maintaining and managing a
monopoly of violence. The monopoly in turn would spur the growth of a
bigger and more powerful state. Economic liberalism would result in
political illiberalism, Linguet argued. And both of them were, according to
Linguet, legacies of the philosophe culture, one in which there was no
absolute value, but merely a fluctuating price, and in which, accordingly, it
was impossible to live or speak in good faith, or to hold anyone accountable.
The axiological void at the heart of the free market economy encouraged a
social and epistemological crisis that allowed the forces of anarchy and
corruption to grow by feeding on each other. In this paradigm, the
connection between a deregulated market, the proliferation of state
bureaucracy, and the development of a police state due to the social unrest
caused by a malfunctioning government and a rampant oligarchy
manipulating the free market is one between cause and effects.
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Mircea Platon. Department of History, SSHRC Fellow

Contact Adress: Department of History. University of Toronto.
Sidney Smith Hall 2066. Toronto Ontario M5S 3G3 CANADA
Phone: 647-427-0366. Mircea.platon@gmail.com

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Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguets Eighteenth-Century Perspectives

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To cite this article: Platon, M. (2015). Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguets

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class kowtowing to the masses. The discourse of free market is also a

Linguet and the Philosophe Culture

Edward Gibbon, visiting France in 1763, noted that the pro-philosophe

private notebooks (Tocquevilles). If distinguished by its quality, the

works, such as Le Fanatisme des philosophes (1764a) and Ncessit dune

avec fruit, dialogue philosophique pour servir de supplement a la "Thorie

hunted down, insulted, viciously slandered, almost destroyed by his enemies,

monetarization of economy that forced people to bow to the market. The

Linguet, the Guilds, and the Politics of Simplicity

Beside the political conditions for the growth of a despotic big

Consequently, the variations, the alternatives, the afterthoughts and the

reducing the number of small independent farmers - whom the physiocrats

Paradoxically, Turgot attacked the guilds precisely because he was not an

corporations. Therefore, with the exception of four guilds, those of the

judicial feud between bakers and steakhouse proprietors about whether or

business because they would not be able to face dishonest competitors. By

organically involved in policing the kingdom (Linguet, 1776, p. 10). It was a

nationale, and tackled homelessness in a Plan dtablissement, tendans

Linguet argued that it was easier to police corporations than individuals.

widows or of craftsmen going through dry patches (Linguet, 1776, p.20).

Burke. E. (translator) (1777). Linguets letter On Montesquieu and Grotius

De Dijn, A. (2008). French Political Thought from Montesquieu to

Morellet, A. (1821). Mmoires sur le dix-huitime sicle et sur la

Shackleton, R. (1977). When Did the French Philosophes Become a

Weulersse, G. (1910b). Les manuscrits conomiques de Franois de Quesnay

Mircea Platon. Department of History, SSHRC Fellow

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